Rensselaer Democrat, Volume 1, Number 5, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 13 May 1898 — Nature’s Gardens in Alaska. [ARTICLE]

Nature’s Gardens in Alaska.

The most expensive, least spoiled, and most unspoliable of the gardens of the" continent, says John Muir, iti the Atlantic, are the vast tundras of Alaska. Every summer they extend smooth, even, undulating, continuous beds of flowers and leaves from about latitude C 2 degrees to the shores of the Arctic Ocean. And in winter, sheets of snow flowers make all the country shine, one mass of white radiance, like a star. Nor are these Arctic plant people the pitiful frost-pinched unfortunates they are guessed to be by those why k&ve Vwver seen them. Though lowly in stature, keeping near the frozen ground as if loving it, they are bright and cheery, and speak nature’s love as plainly as their big relatives of the SoHith. Tenderly happed and tucked in beneath down® snow to sleep through the huge white winter, they make haste to bloom in the .spring without trying to grow tall, though some rise high enough to ripple and wave in the wind, and display masses of color—yellow, purple and blue—so rieli they look like beds of rainbows, and are visible miles and miles away. * * * And in September, the tundra glows in creamy golden sunshine, and the colors of the ripe foliage of the lieathworts. willows and birch, red, purple and yellow, in pure, bright tones, are enriched with those of berries which are scattered everywhere as if they had been showered down from the clouds like hail; their colors, of the leaves and stems, blending harmoniously with the neutral tints of the ground of and mosses on which they seem to be painted.